Category: Financial

An interesting dynamic is contrasting tonight’s embrace of Republican politicians – votes in favor of increases in the minimum wage.

So far, South Dakota, Arkansas, and Nebraska have voted to increase their minimum wages today. You will note that these states are not hotbeds of progressive politics. Alaska has a pending vote to raise theirs as well. We should not be surprised to see it pass either. We know from polls that raises in minimum wages are popular up until people are told that increases may cost jobs. Then they turn against it. Emily Ekins explains how that polling works here. A majority are okay with it increases in minimum wages driving up prices. But if it costs jobs, a majority turns against it.

And so the debate becomes about costing jobs. Does it really? We have a real world example to explain. In Los Angeles, the city passed an ordinance requiring “living wages” for employees of hotels near the city’s airport back in 2008. As they considered expanding the law to all large hotel workers in the city earlier this year they commissioned studies to analyze the impact of their previous increase. Here’s what Christopher Thornberg of Beacon Economics discovered:

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.” From The General Theory by John Maynard Keynes

Much of the centralized planning and rationalization for the Fascist alliance between the State and Corporatism is rooted in the erroneous Keynesian fiscal tenets, which plague Western economies. Without a widespread acceptance of an alternative economic model, the political despotism will continue to ruin the financial futures of generations to come. The ruling political class is so enamored with the free spending debt dogma that prospects for abandoning such deviate and suicidal policies will meet with ardent resistance from the establishment. Need proof, just look at the historic disparity in income and net worth that has doubled the paper wealth of the top elites as the general population languishes.

Prolific academic and Libertarian Gary North takes on this issue in his article, On Replacing the Keynesian Establishment. His essays are always informative, historically based and intuitive in presenting a fresh viewpoint in dealing with the dysfunctional economic system that has become our mutual prison.

“In planning to undermine the Keynesian establishment, there really needs to be somebody with money and vision who sits down and devises a plan to do it . . .

There is nothing even remotely resembling a systematic program to deal with Keynes, let alone Keynesianism. That’s why I devised one, but limited it tactically. It has to do what has not been done, namely, to bury Keynes’s major book. That is where the resistance must start; that is not where it should end.”